MASON, Ohio — During Mental Health Awareness Month (May), WCPO 9 and Cincinnati Children's Hospital teamed up to discuss the issues and innovations when it comes to the mental health of children. WCPO 9 was invited to Mason High School, just one of the locations for the hospital's school-based program.
"We needed something different," Mason City Schools Prevention and Wellness Supervisor Nicole Pfirman said.
Pfirman brought Mason Early Childhood Center's service dog, Gibson to our interview.
"Sometimes they have a better opportunity to de-escalate with the dog than with a human," Pfirman said. "Some of our students are not able to express verbally what they're struggling with but when they are interacting with the dog we can see that they're calming."
Gibson is one of six therapy dogs utilized within the Mason City School district. Pfirman says it's just one initiative through its school-based program with Cincinnati Children's Hospital and it started at the perfect time.
"Kids were struggling with higher levels of anxiety, higher levels of depression, at a much younger age that we had seen before," Pfirman said. "Schools just weren't prepared to deal with those kinds of behaviors."
Pfirman says that increase happened right as the program took shape in the 2019-2020 school year, then the pandemic started. Lead social worker of the school-based program, Emily Meyer, said this really affected younger children.
"When we look at the brain development of a child where ever they were, that definitely changed the way they learn, the way that they learned how to socially interact with others," Meyer said.
Meyer tells us two weeks after children settled into to online learning, their staff switched to providing virtual sessions. When the district welcomed students back, more problems began to emerge.
"There was just a significant increase in anxiety and depression," Pfirman said. "Some of them cannot walk into the building the anxiety is so high."
The program added more onsite therapists to help school counselors with the sheer amount of referrals they were getting.
"That's maybe a good problem to have but a difficult problem to solve," Meyer said.
Meyer says in her two decades working with children and families, this generation of parents and their kids are more likely to reach out for help.
But even with the additional staff provided by Cincinnati Children's, they need more.
"We don't have enough providers nationally that we're experiencing right now," Meyer said.
Pfirman says this model is positively impacting child mental health outcomes.
"The shift from focusing on talking about mental health to focusing on how do we make environments and our schools mentally well," Pfirman said. " Focusing on wellness has made a huge difference."
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